A promise made twenty-eight years ago calls seven adults to reunite in Derry, Maine, where as teenagers they battled an evil creature that preyed on the city’s children. Unsure that their Losers Club had vanquished the creature all those years ago, the seven had vowed to return to Derry if IT should ever reappear. Now, children are being murdered again and their repressed memories of that summer return as they prepare to do battle with the monster lurking in Derry’s sewers once more.
Авторы: King Stephen Edwin
Then he thought that even little kids and babies had power; they could cry until you had to do something to shut them up.
‘Ben?’ Beverly asked, looking back at him. ‘Cat got your tongue?’
‘Huh? No. I was thinking about power. The power of the slugs.’
Bill was looking at him closely.
‘I was wondering where that power came from,’ Ben said.
‘Ih-Ih-It — ‘ Bill began, and then shut his mouth. A thoughtful, vague expression drifted over his face.
‘I really have to go,’ Beverly said. ‘I’ll see you all, huh?’
‘Sure, come on down tomorrow,’ Stan said. ‘We’re going to break Eddie’s other arm.’
They all laughed. Eddie pretended to throw his aspirator at Stan.
‘Bye, then,’ Beverly said, and boosted herself up and out.
Ben looked at Bill and saw that he hadn’t joine d in the laughter. That thoughtful expression was still on his face, and Ben knew you would have to call his name two or three times before he would answer. He knew what Bill was thinking about; he would be thinking about it himself in the days ahead. Not all the time, no. There would be clothes to hang out and take in for his mother, games of tag and guns in the Barrens, and, during a rainy spell the first four days of August, the seven of them would go on a mad Parcheesi jag at Richie Tozier’s house, making blockades, sending each other back with great abandon, deliberating exactly how to
split the roll of the dice while rain dripped and ran outside. His mother would announce to him that she believed Pat Nixon was the prettiest woman in America, and be horror-struck when Ben opted for Marilyn Monroe (except for the color of her hair, he thought that Bev looked like Marilyn Monroe). There would be time to eat as many Twinkies and Ring-Dings and Devil Dogs as he could get his hands on, and time to sit on the back porch reading Lucky Starr and the Moons of Mercury. There would be time for all of those things while the wound on his chest and belly healed to a scab and began to itch, because life went on and at eleven, although bright and apt, he held no real sense of perspective. He could live with what had happened in the house on Neibolt Street. The world was, after all, full of wonders.
But there would be odd moments of time when he pulled the questions out again and examined them: The power of the silver, the power of the slugs — where does power like that come from? Where does any power come from? How do you get it? How do you use it?
It seemed to him that their lives might depend on those questions. One night as he was falling asleep, the rain a steady lulling patter on the roof and against the windows, it occurred to him that there was another question, perhaps the only question. It had some real shape; he had nearly seen it. To see the shape was to see the secret. Was that also true of power? Perhaps it was. For wasn’t it true that power, like It, was a shape-changer? It was a baby crying in the middle of the night, it was an atomic bomb, it was a silver slug, it was the way Beverly looked at Bill and the way Bill looked back.
What, exactly what, was power, anyway?
12
Nothing much happened for the next two weeks. ‘You got to lose
You can’t win all the time.
You got to lose
You can’t win all the time, what’d I say?
I know, pretty baby,
I see trouble comin down the line.’
— John Lee Hooker, ‘You Got to Lose’
April 6th, 1985
Tell you what, friends and neighbors — I’m drunk tonight. Fuck-drunk. Rye whiskey. Went down to Wally’s and got started, went to the greenfront down on Center Street half an hour before they closed, and bought a fifth of rye. I know what I’m up to. Drink cheap tonight, pay dear tomorrow. So here he sits, one drunk nigger in a public library after closing, with this book open in front of me and the bottle of Old Kentucky on my left. Tell the truth and shame the devil,’ my mom used to say, but she forgot to tell me that sometimes you can’t shame Mr Splitfoot sober. The Irish know, but of course they’re God’s white niggers and who knows, maybe they’re a step ahead.
Want to write about drink and the devil. Remember Treasure Island? The old seadog at The Admiral Benbow. ‘We’ll do ’em yet, Jacky!’ I bet the bitter old fuck even believed it. Full of rum — or rye — you can believe anything.
Drink and the devil. Okay.
Amuses me sometimes to think how long I’d last if I actually published some of this stuff I write in the dead of night. If I flashed
